CSR
Corporate social responsibility
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a company's responsibility for its impacts on people and the environment, and the way it manages those impacts across its operations and value chain.
The European Commission has defined CSR since 2011 as "the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society". In practice, it covers environmental topics (climate, pollution, resources), social topics (working conditions, human rights, communities) and governance (ethics, anti-corruption, responsible purchasing).
In the United States, the same work usually goes by "sustainability" or "ESG". The words differ, the topics are the same: CSR describes how a company manages its impacts, ESG describes how outsiders measure them.
For most companies, CSR becomes concrete through outside requests: a customer sends an EcoVadis invitation, an investor asks for a CDP response, a tender asks for a sustainability policy. ISO 26000 (2010) remains the reference guidance for structuring the approach as a whole.